About

I am a PhD student at Princeton University, advised by Karthik Narasimhan.

In my work, I study methods, evaluations, abstractions, and risks of language agents.

In my life, I read, travel, rap, and play basketball.

To anyone: give me feedback about anything!

To students: email me to schedule a chat about anything! I commit 30min/week and priortize underrepresented groups.

Recent News

  • Sep 2023: Excited to release 🐨CoLLA, a systematic framework for language agents! Summary here.
  • Aug 2023: I gave a two-hour talk covering ReAct, Reflexion, ToT, WebShop, InterCode, Collie. Slides here.
  • Jul 2023: I enjoyed teaching at Princeton AI4ALL! Coverage here.
  • Jul 2023: I wrote a blog post with Karthik about opportunities and risks of language agents! Comment here.
  • Apr 2023: I attended LangChain’s Agent webinar. Summary here.

Recent Papers

  • Embers of Autoregression: Understanding Large Language Models Through the Problem They are Trained to Solve
    R. Thomas McCoy, Shunyu Yao, Dan Friedman, Matthew Hardy, Thomas L. Griffiths
    paper | repo | tweet

  • Cognitive Architectures for Language Agents
    Shunyu Yao*, Theodore Sumers*, Karthik Narasimhan, Thomas L. Griffiths
    paper | repo | tweet

  • Referral Augmentation for Zero-Shot Information Retrieval
    Michael Tang, Shunyu Yao, John Yang, Karthik Narasimhan
    paper | repo | tweet

  • Collie: Systematic Construction of Constrained Text Generation Tasks
    Shunyu Yao*, Howard Chen*, Austin Wang*, Runzhe Yang*, Karthik Narasimhan
    paper | repo | tweet | project

  • InterCode: Standardizing and Benchmarking Interactive Coding with Execution Feedback
    John Yang, Akshara Prabhakar, Karthik Narasimhan, Shunyu Yao
    NeurIPS 2023 Datasets and Benchmarks Track
    paper | repo | tweet | project

  • Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learning
    Noah Shinn, Federico Cassano, Beck Labash, Ashwin Gopinath, Karthik Narasimhan, Shunyu Yao
    NeurIPS 2023
    paper | repo | tweet

  • Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models
    Shunyu Yao, Dian Yu, Jeffrey Zhao, Izhak Shafran, Thomas L. Griffiths, Yuan Cao, Karthik Narasimhan
    NeurIPS 2023 (Oral)
    paper | repo | tweet

  • ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models
    Shunyu Yao, Jeffrey Zhao, Dian Yu, Nan Du, Izhak Shafran, Karthik Narasimhan, Yuan Cao
    ICLR 2023 (Oral)
    paper | repo | tweet | project | Google AI blogpost

  • WebShop: Towards Scalable Real-World Web Interaction with Grounded Language Agents
    Shunyu Yao*, Howard Chen*, John Yang, Karthik Narasimhan
    NeurIPS 2022
    paper | repo | tweet | project | demo | Quanta Magazine

Recent Talks

  • Cognitive Architectures for Language Agents
    • MiraclePlus, Remote, Sep 2023
    • Cognitive Science Colloquium, Princeton, Sep 2023
  • From Language Models to Language Agents
    • Tsinghua University, Remote, Aug 2023
  • Tree of Thoughts: System 2 Reasoning, Tree Search, and Language Agents
    • Google DeepMind, Remote, Jul 2023
    • Allen Institute for AI, Seattle, Aug 2023
  • Towards Autonomous Language Agents
    • DeepMind, London, Apr 2023
    • EPFL NLP Group, Lausanne, Mar 2023
    • Berekley NLP Group, Berekley, Mar 2023
    • OpenAI, San Francisco, Mar 2023
    • Adept AI, San Francisco, Mar 2023
  • Re-thinking Reinforcement Learning in the Era of Large Language Models
    • Jane Street, New York, Apr 2023
  • ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models
    • ICLR, Kigali, May 2023
    • EMNLP EvoNLP & NILLI Workshops, Abu Dhabi, Dec 2022
    • NeurIPS FMDM Workshop, New Orleans, Nov 2022
  • Towards Human-like Language Models
    • Cognitive Science Colloquium, Princeton, Nov 2022
  • WebShop: Towards Scalable Real-World Web Interaction with Grounded Language Agents
    • University of Washington, Seattle, Jul 2022

Recent Readings

  • Set Theory (John Burgess)
  • The Computer and the Brain (John von Neumann)
  • Automata Studies (Editted by C.E. Shannon and J. McCarthy)
  • Team of Rivals (Doris Goodwin)
  • The Linguistics Wars (Randy Harris)
  • What Babies Know (Elizabeth Spelke)

(last updated: Sep 2023)